One of the really cool [1] things about television shows these days is the complexity and sheer number of storylines that they’re squeezing into them. What’s even cooler is that we’re able to follow each of those threads, for the most part, reasonably easily. Though recaps and other assists help us keep things straight. Of course, this is not to say that the A/B storyline concept is dead [2]. That is indeed alive and well, and will continue to be the dominant narrative form on television for the foreseeable future.

If that jargon has thrown any of you, here’s a quick recap. A storyline is a narrative thread "experienced by different but specific characters or sets of characters that together form a plot element or subplot in the work of fiction" [Source: Wikipedia]. Basically, a storyline is a plot (if there’s only one storyline) or a sub-plot (if there are more). You can also call them story threads.

Single-Plot Stories

Older television shows (and even movies) usually had just one storyline that ran, for the most part, linearly. There was usually only one major plot (e.g. Spock, Kirk, and McCoy get stranded in the 1930s after stepping through the portal called The Guardian of Forever) and, occasionally, a few minor sub-plots (e.g. Kirk, surprisingly, finds the time to fall in love with Keeler). And we were usually shown these in chronological order unless, of course, there were flashbacks.

This is generally (not always!) what makes older stuff a little harder (i.e. a little boring) to watch. Though an episode like Star Trek: The Original Series’ The City on the Edge of Forever is far from boring!

Multiple-Plot Stories

Then came the concept of the A/B storyline [3]. In this, two (or more) story threads (i.e. narrative plots) are developed simultaneously. The A-storyline is the main plot of the episode. For example, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Once More With Feeling, the A-storyline is the one in which the team investigates the spontaneous singing and bursting-into-flames phenomenon and tackles Sweet, the demon who has been summoned to Sunnydale and has caused all this mayhem.

The B-storyline, meanwhile, is a sub-plot that usually does things like character development, moving forward a developing story arc (i.e. a plot spread over a number of episodes), or supporting the main plot in some way or the other. In Once More With Feeling there are two main B-storylines. One is Tara finding out that Willow is abusing her Wiccan powers (and using them on Tara) and the second is Giles realizing that it is time for him to leave Buffy on her own (and for him to go back to England). The former doesn’t figure much into this particular episode but the latter almost gets Buffy killed. You could say there are two more B-storylines going on: the first addressing the Buffy-Spike relationship and the second exploring the Anya-Xander relationship in more depth. Those are a little less important though, so you could even call them C-storylines!

Generally, though, shows produced after the turn of the century have lots of little subplots and storylines being developed in them all at the same time. That is, there aren’t just two storylines, the A and the B, there are a few. Despite that fact, the phrase "A/B storyline" still generally works.

By the way, I chose Once More With Feeling to explain storylines specifically because each B-storyline literally gets its own song in that episode!

Craploads-of-Plots Stories

What’s happening in television shows these days, though, is that there are many more storylines that just a handful. Lost is probably the first series to explicitly explore numerous storylines, character development arcs, and overall story arcs. This fact was initially daunting but, once you got used to it, all the storylines fit together and made sense. It was a little difficult, though, to start watching the series mid-season since you weren’t quite sure what was going on. Also, Lost uses flashbacks to explain a lot of what is happening with its characters.

Heroes, which just started its second season in the US a few days ago, is the second major series to tackle this many storylines. In this they use both recaps and captions (that give you characters’ names and locations) to help you figure out what’s going on. That is particularly important for this series since, basically, it is narrated like a comic book.

The best thing about all this, then, is the fact that television shows are starting to become more compelling (narrative-wise, that is, since you have to have good writers on the show to be able to pull off that many simultaneous storylines and still make sense!); more in-depth with their stories (though, understandably they’re a little slower with story development); and more prone to cult-like followings (since laypeople will find it hard to join mid-way…and once you’re hooked, you’re hooked). All of this, in my opinion at least, is a good thing.

Multiple, complex storylines = good.

Footnotes

[1] I have to stop using the words "cool", "awesome", "great", and "really".

[2] Or is it "A-B storyline"…I don’t know.

[3] In television shows, that is. Plots and sub-plots have always existed in books.

I’ve already written on this blog that I love Google Reader so you know that I’m into news feeds (lots of them!). What is really cool on the Internet these days, though, is the number and variety of sites and services that are starting to offer them.

There are, of course, the obvious ones:

• Other blogs — all of them!
• News services — like BBC, Digg, and Google News
• Cartoon sites — like xkcd, PhD Comics, and User Friendly
• Netcast (or, if you prefer, podcast) sites — like TWiT and DL.TV

That is, sites that feature dynamic, regularly updated content.

And then there are the less obvious ones. Much to my delight, the two that I’ve recently discovered are:

• Facebook, which gives you an RSS feed of your friends’ user statuses (so you can find out what they’re up to without having to log in and you don’t miss anyone’s status update)
• Flickr, which gives you a feed that contains the latest pictures uploaded by a particular user

Both are really useful and I’m glad they’re there. Thanks, people!

Now if only sites like Ain’t it Cool News, Airliners.net, and McSweeney’s would start offering news feeds too. Some day.

Since yesterday, Victoria (the province that Melbourne is in) has been buffeted by strong winds — sometimes reaching gale force in localized areas. There hasn’t been much damage, though the Bureau of Meteorology has issued a severe weather warning for “Localised Damaging Winds”.

I walked home through that weather last night and, when I was about four streets away, it started raining. The rain itself wasn’t hard but the wind was whipping it around quite a bit. Though I’ve been through heavier rains and thunderstorms in Melbourne, this was the first time I really felt the power of the elements — which is a feeling that I really love. Of course, as Richard Adams says in his book ‘Watership Down‘, the only reason we can say that is because we know we can protect ourselves from those very elements. If we couldn’t, we probably wouldn’t love, say, winter all that much (which, by the way, is my favourite season).

Anyway, as I hurried down the street while being pelted by rain, I realized just how much I miss the South Asian monsoons. I’ve been in Australia for the last two monsoon seasons — which, in Pakistan, runs from end June to September — and there’s nothing quite like that on this continent. And though the weather here is sometimes more extreme, I do miss those rains (the thunder, those heavy showers) very much. It’s not just the rains, though. It’s the sights, the sounds, the smells, and ultimately, what the coming of the monsoon means for that part of the world. The monsoon heralds the coming of a new season, a new beginning, a new lease of life for that land…something that washes away the previous year and brings in the next. [I’m not going to try to be poetic about this. Many others have done a much better job that I can ever do!]

I think it was the smell of fresh rain on the ground that triggered my memories. That and the fact that I wasn’t getting drenched like I would have been, had this been a monsoon rain. I wonder when I’ll get to experience that next. Probably not next year. The year after that, maybe? Only if I’m lucky. Oh well.

Two more snippets from the Internet. (It’s just one of those days where interesting things are happening elsewhere.)

Dog owners will appreciate and understand Khoi Vinh’s logic flowchart for dogs. It revolves around eating and napping and reminds me a lot of Missy and Rufus, our two Labradors back home:

Though they’re much bigger now — both age-wise and size-wise — than they are in that photograph. Oh, and the comments to Vinh’s post are great too so make sure you read those.

Meanwhile, Reuters is reporting that, thanks to the Internet Age (or Information Age, whatever), the Oxford English Dictionary has dropped the hyphen from about 16,000 words in the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.

They did this after reviewing "2 billion words, consisting of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, Web sites and blogs from 2000 onwards". Ah, the joys of witnessing the evolution of a living language.

Since I have finally started posting about music, here’s something else you might want to check out: Band From TV.

This is a bunch of successful TV stars — like Hugh Laurie from ‘House’ (on keyboards) and Greg Grunberg from ‘Heroes’ (on drums) — who are also amateur musicians. They play mostly cover songs at live venues (though they have an album coming out later this year) and they do it all for charity. They’re quite good too.

I haven’t been online much these last few days (and probably won’t be till the weekend either) so I’m just popping in to post two interesting things.

First, Bruce Springsteen’s new album ‘Magic’ is going on sale soon (2nd October in the US). In the lead up to that, his first single, ‘Radio Nowhere’, is available for download for free by Sony BMG. It’s quite an awesome song and you can get it from this site: http://www.radionowheredownload.com.

Second, thanks to a posting by The Bad Astronomer, I too am being enchanted by the music of Marian Call. Her music is really good and it’s funny just how much I relate to the lyrics of ‘I’m Not Sexy’. If you get a chance, take a listen.

If you read blogs — especially if you read a lot of blogs — and regularly browse the Internet to keep up with what’s going on in the world, check out Google Reader, Google’s web-based news feed reader/aggregator. It’s fresh out of beta and really is quite fantastic.

Other than providing you with the obvious benefits of an aggregator:

Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or "personal newspaper". [Source: Wikipedia]

it is free, fast, efficient, and very well designed. You can check your feeds online (which is really cool) but can take them offline as well (up to 2,000 posts).

It also has a few extra features thrown in. For example, you can bookmark your posts (by ’starring’ them) though that’s not all that special. What is special is that you can share your favourite posts online as well. You do that simply by clicking on the ’share’ icon that appears at the bottom of each post. Doing that adds that particular post to your personal, automatically generated open-to-the-public Google Reader page (which, by the way, even has it’s own RSS feed). Quite fantastic.

For The Blogger

Meanwhile, if you are a blogger yourself — and you use Windows — check out Windows Live Writer (WLW), Microsoft’s new (still in beta) blog authoring tool. It may make your life a lot easier.

Much like an e-mail client, WLW lets you write blog posts offline in a full-featured rich text editor (which is generally better than what your blogging software has online). You can then publish your postings to your blog with the click of a button. That in itself is really cool: You can be blogging even when you’re not connected to the Internet and you can save your drafts locally as well.

What makes WLW fantastic though is that, when you add your blog account to it (it supports all popular blogging tools and services), it downloads your design template and tags. It then loads those into its editor so, when you compose a post, it actually looks like you’re typing into your blog! For example, this is what I see as I type this post in WLW:

That actually looks like I’m typing into the blog itself. Compare that to the WordPress view that I would otherwise have gotten:

That makes quite a difference, doesn’t it?

Another cool thing is that you can save your drafts online (to your blog) so you’re not tied to that particular computer when composing a post. Again, quite fantastic. 

The Bigger Scheme of Things

In the bigger scheme of things, it’s great that both Google and Microsoft are taking on board the fact that people like doing things both online and offline. And that this is not true for just e-mailing (for which I use Thunderbird offline and Yahoo! online, by the way) but for other things like blogging and composing (and collaborating on) documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Most cool.

Want to Know More?

These days, lots of software development teams that are working on online products and services maintain blogs. The Reader and Live Writer teams are no exceptions:

• Writer Zone
• Official Google Reader Blog

By the way, the big three — Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft — have lots of other product/service blogs as well. You can find them all online but here are three each to get your started:

• Google: Official, Gmail, News
• Microsoft: Live, Search, Mail
• Yahoo!: Search, Messenger, Mail

Enjoy :)

Monsters & Critics is reporting that comedian Billy Connolly will be playing Zenophilious Lovegood (Luna Lovegood’s father) in the upcoming Harry Potter movie ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’! That’s brilliant because Connolly is an exceptionally funny actor who has just the right amount of wackiness to play this particular role.

It’s cool how, despite the fact that they’re playing mostly bit parts, this franchise has gotten a whole bunch of seriously talented actors and actresses [1] to act in this series of movies. All of them are perfect for their roles [2], of course, though one wishes one could see more of them. Oh well.

Fry on the Web

Speaking of fantastic comedians (which is how we started), Stephen Fry now has a blog. His first (and, so far, only) entry is about the iPhone. Apparently, he’s a huge PDA fan (”I have never seen a SmartPhone I haven’t bought”). Who’d've thunk? Anyway, it makes a great read and, hopefully, he’ll be an active blogger. Now wouldn’t that be awesome.

Footnotes

Yes, I have footnotes in a blog posting. Want to make something of it?

[1] Or, if you want to be more politically correct (Hollywood style), just “actors”.

[2] Like Alan Rickman as Serverus Snape, Kenneth Branagh as Gilderloy Lockhart, Maggie Smith as Minerva McGonagall, Emma Thompson as Sybill Trelawney, Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange, Gary Oldman as Sirius Black, and Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort.

I’ve upgraded my avatar!

It’s gone from this Matrix-inspired, plain black-and-white one:

to this Star Trek: The Next Generation-inspired, more detailed and coloured one:

If you’re interested, I’ve written about this on my website.

What do you think?

The last two or three generations have all gone through some form of communications revolution or the other. From the introduction of the telephone, to the early days of the “wireless”, the widespread availability of low-cost printing, the ubiquity of broadcast media, all the way to the modern day proliferation of mobile phones, computers, and the Internet. And those are only a few of the technologies that have continued to further empower, enable, and connect people around the world. There are many more.

What is important and relevant to us these days (and to this posting, of course) is the communications revolution that we’re going through right now. And, as with every communications revolution, it’s not just about the technology, it’s about what people are doing with that technology. That is, for example, while it Internet itself is really quite remarkable, what’s even more remarkable is what people are doing with it, what they’re using it for, and the content they’re creating on it.

Recently, Wil Wheaton wrote a good article about all this in his weekly ‘Geek in Review’ on the Suicide Girls website. He writes:

Communication empowers people, and an empowered people are very, very scary to the powerful upper class who hope that we’ll just go away, right after we buy a lot of crap from them that we don’t need. And holy shit are they scared right now. The revolution may not be televised, but it’s being blogged, YouTubed, MySpaced, Facebooked, Dugg and Netscaped.

The follow-up discussion about that article on his blog is good too.

Phil Plait from the Bad Astronomy Blog then carried the discussion forward by talking about the problems we face when going through revolutions:

Old media (especially movies and radio) are dying, but their death throes are damaging new media too. Wil makes this point about DRM, the RIAA, and other hurtful acronymicious things. They are scared of teh ‘tubes, so they try to make them knuckle under. It’s not working well.

And there’s much more discussion about all this on the comments to his posting as well.

My own take on all this mimics what Wil and Phil are saying, of course, but I just wanted to add something that Isaac Asimov wrote in one of his essays (I don’t remember which one). He said that it’s cool to be living in an age in which you can actually follow the evolutions and revolutions in technology that take place in your own lifetime. Before this, things happened over a number of generations. Nowadays, Moore’s Law holds.

And the awesome thing is that, the people who are able to follow these evolutions and revolutions (i.e. those who learn from the past, live in the present, and create the future — like Phil and Wil), what do they do? They blog, they make websites, they write articles on those websites, they record and freely distribute audio and video netcasts…basically, they use all of these revolutionary technologies to, well, further the revolution. And it’s not the technology revolution they’re furthering, it’s the social one. The one that talks about equity, fairness, honesty, peace, justice, kindness, and so on and so forth. And that, really, is what it’s all about.